Author: Roberta Grimes

Going Home (Part Two)

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

Most people live on a lonely island, lost in the middle of a foggy sea.
Most people long for another island,
One where they know they would like to be.
Bali Ha’i may call you, any night, any day.
In your heart you’ll hear it call you. Come away, come away.
Bali Ha’i will whisper on the wind of the sea.
Here am I, your special island! Come to me, come to me.
Your own special hopes, your own special dreams
Loom on the hillside and shine in the Streams!
If you try, you will find me where the sky meets the sea.
Here am I, your special island! Come to me, come to me.
Bali Ha’i, Bali Ha’i, Bali Ha’i!
– Richard Rodgers (1902-1979) & Oscar Hammerstein II (1895-1960), from “Bali Ha’i” (1949)

The quirkily lavish, oddly earthlike, and entirely solid-seeming reality that we enter at death, having just left a bland, familiar, and also solid-seeming earth-reality that is right in the very same place can be easily explained. As you and the few loved ones that you had thought were dead, but who are still quite alive after all and look to be amazingly less than thirty years old, step together into a patch of gray fog that invites you to leave the scene of your earthly death, you all are still giggling a little with the joy of being together again. You are stepping, but mostly it feels as if that fog is moving you right along. You look back, and you see that the room in which you have just died and all the people in it are growing vague and vapory; and then it all disappears.  And very soon, right ahead of you the fog begins to lift; and as it does, there appears all around you a scene of the most confounding beauty. At first, you think, Huh? How is this even possible? How can two solid realities exist in pretty much exactly the same place? But then you remember what Roberta and her spirit guide, Thomas, used to say about matter all the time. Earth-matter is somehow 99.9999999% just empty space!

And now, in this amazingly beautiful, new but somehow strangely familiar place where everything seems to be erroneously colored – perhaps red grass and a yellow river beneath a brilliant green-and-orange sky – you and your mom sit down together on a solid stone bench, while your childhood cat leaps into your lap. Now your new body is young and lovely, too! In the distance, you can see people playing with odd sorts of toy vehicles that never have been seen on earth, small one-seater planes and helicopters and an in-line two-seater car, none of which vehicles makes a sound or gives off exhaust because they all are powered by mind. There are advanced Beings nearby as well, very tall and wearing long dresses and various hats and insignias of rank, but none of them approaches you. They know that you have just died on earth and arrived with your loved ones in this arrival garden, and you need a little time to re-acclimate yourself. Yes, you are breathing, but that seems to be optional. The very air feels and tastes like flowers, like love, like everything beautiful. And wow, there even are snow-capped mountains in the distance!

Right about now, or even before now, your more limited earth-mind will re-merge back into the sixty to seventy percent of your vast, eternal mind that was left behind when you took that last incarnation, just completed. Suddenly you are incredibly brilliant again and you remember very many things, including old friends that you realize you had missed very much, and prominent past lifetimes. This moment oddly seems to be no particular time, and there is no sun, and while the sky is streaked with colors, there don’t seem to be clouds. At some point, whether it is a minute or days later in earth-terms is immaterial, an advanced Being or a few advanced Beings approach and sit down beside you, and you know that these are spirit guides of this lifetime that you have just completed. If you are vibrating at a higher level than the Level Three entrance level, now is when they will invite you to join them at that higher level. Truly, you have at last come home!

This has been a typical description of the sort of post-death trip to an arrival garden as it has happened from a normal North American death on earth at any time during the past century and a half. If you had died instead in England, or in China or Japan, or in Serbia or Australia, your post-death surroundings would have looked culturally different, but the process afterward that we are soon to describe would have been about the same. Sadly, though, it is much harder in recent years for those who are nearing death to know beforehand what is going to happen to them after they die. And one of the reasons for that, I am sorry to say, is all the people who have had near-death experiences (NDEs) over the past fifty years, and who are now convinced that they have been briefly stone-cold dead and been to the genuine afterlife and then miraculously come back to life, and that now they have big news to reveal to the world. It is too bad, really. NDEs are interesting phenomena, although they are of limited educational value. And actual death, or even near-death, NDEs certainly ARE NOT.

There are a few genuine scholars, of whom I am one, who have spent decades studying more than two hundred years of abundant and consistent true afterlife evidence. The best of this evidence was produced in the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries via deep-trance mediumship, which is a very advanced and much more accurate form of mediumship than is mental mediumship. For reasons that we needn’t pause to mention now, it barely still exists today. Here are three fundamental facts which are true beyond question:

  • Death is always a one-way trip. What maintains the life of your material body during the frequent out-of-body experiences that all or nearly all of us enjoy during our lives on earth is an amazingly stretchy energy cord which was first named in the Bible “the silver cord” (Ecclesiastes 12:6), which connects our material body with our energy body. Near-death experiences are a type of out-of-body experience that generally happen in the astral plane, of which what we call the afterlife is a tiny part: we will be talking about the whole greater reality next week. But the silver cord cannot be reattached, so once yours breaks, then your material death must occur. Many of the more extensive near-death experiences will come to a place where the NDE-er will be warned that he or she must turn back because the afterlife area is just ahead, and if they continue forward, then their silver cord will break and they will die. No one who is alive on earth now and able to tell the story has ever actually died.
  • Normal deaths are in large part remarkably consistent experiences. The afterlife is surprisingly, although quirkily, earthlike, having been created by minds that have interacted with the earth. And soon after we first return to the afterlife, we are loved and supported through a very consistent love-based welcoming and decompression process that is designed to help us to make the most of what we have leaned during our time on earth. I will briefly describe that usual process just below. NDEs often contain some of these usual post-death elements, especially versions of the life review, but generally in NDEs these are mixed with odd dreamlike events.
  • “God”, “Satan,” and strange mythic creatures don’t appear in the genuine afterlife. For example, I have never seen any credible report of God appearing anywhere in physical form, and both Thomas and Jesus have told me that God never takes a physical form. Jesus does appear, but in His own places and for His own teaching purposes. There is no hell, yet it has been reported that as many as one in seven NDEs is in some way hellish. And our minds are unfortunately very powerful! People who trust that some famous NDE-er’s story is a real report of what they themselves can expect to experience when they die risk letting their adherence to that story lead their own actual death process far astray.

What is alarming to me is that many people who leave their bodies at death will nowadays go off-track for a time. For many, it will be just a few earth-days or earth-weeks of confusion; but for some, it will be much longer than that. Mikey Morgan and my Thomas both tell us that the percentage of people who today do not smoothly transition to the afterlife may be close to twenty-five percent of those who die on earth! Think about that! Almost one in four! Just between the exit from their body that we reported on last week, and the arrival in the afterlife that we have described this week, almost one-quarter of those who die on earth will now go off-track for days, or even for years. And some of them will go so far off-track that one-by-one they will have to be sought and found and rescued before they can be taken to that reception garden.

Is the recent broad fascination with NDEs to blame for this problem? Not for all of it, but I think that it likely contributes to some of it. I hear from people about NDEs all the time, and the people that I hear from assume without exception that NDEs depict actual deaths! That fact absolutely horrifies me. If you have fixed in your own mind the NDE dream that was experienced by Eben Alexander, or by another famous NDE-er, as if those people really had died and then come back to life, and if you let your expectation that his dream-experience during his NDE will be your actual post-death experience, and if that expectation then leads you astray at your death, you are going to have a really big problem. But if everyone who is going to die one day were simply programmed to stick with the deathbed visitors who are going to come to take them home, then many more people will likely make that simple journey home unscathed.

But let’s assume here that you have made your afterlife journey home with the help of your treasured loved ones. You have arrived! What generally happens after your brief rest with your loved ones in a reception garden is that, depending upon your mental state, you might spend some further time simply unwinding with your close family and friends, in a family compound perhaps. Or if you have arrived home mentally or physically damaged, you might spend as much as three or four earth-months in what are called the healing gardens, being nursed back to full spiritual health. It is this possibility, that you might have been judged to be in need of healing, which is the reason why we recommend that your loved ones still on earth generally wait for a few months after your death before trying to reach you through a mental medium.

Okay, so now you have been welcomed home by your spirit guide or guides, and by those closest to you from this most recent lifetime. You also have been healed, if necessary. Next will come two big events which can happen in either order, although the order given here seems to be the most usual one. You will have your Life Review, and you will Party Hearty!

  • Your Life Review can happen in many different ways and locations, from privately in a mimic of your earthly home, right through very publicly in a gothic stone castle before a three- to five-person council of elders. I have seen the review described as appearing instantly within a holographic orb, and running either forward or backward, with key people from your lifetime just ended right there beside you, or else with no one there other than your spirit guides. In any event, your guides seem always to be there. And in one way or another, almost right away, every significant event of your life just completed seems to be somehow reviewed again in what seems to be little more than an instant; although, as we have learned by now, in the afterlife there is no real time. And what is important is that we are experiencing every event of our lives from the perspective of the people that we most affected. We are then asked to forgive each one of those people. And then – hardest of all! – we are asked to forgive ourselves. And we must do that! Your guides and others will give you lots of help and support, but if you find that you really cannot forgive yourself for something that you did in this life, then your vibration will slow until you wind up in what Jesus called “the Outer Darkness, where there is wailing and gnashing of teeth” (see e.g. MT 8:12). So please learn prevenient forgiveness right now, for heaven’s sake, while it is very easy to learn and, yes, you can take it with you!
  • Your Welcome Home Party will be for you the time of your afterlife! And mostly because of all the people who might well show up. After all, remember that many of the greats are also in the afterlife, as are people you loved and still resonate with from as far back as your childhood of this past lifetime, and even loved ones from some of your most important previous lifetimes. These bodies lack internal organs and we don’t need to eat or drink in the afterlife, but since you are used to eating and drinking whenever things get festive, of course food and drink are going to be served. Whatever you consume will simply disappear. The joyous call is put out by mind that your welcome home party is going on now and all your special people will be invited, so for what might feel like forever in an eternal heavenly afternoon, they will keep on showing up! Even enemies of this lifetime, who will hug you as you realize that this enemy is a great eternal friend from two lifetimes back. And my goodness, your first girlfriend, a high school teacher, and now here comes John Lennon with his guitar, since you were a big John Lennon fan in life. He speaks quietly with your friends, and then he sits down by the fireplace and he sings Imagine. Of course, everyone knows that there is a laugh line coming, so even before John Lennon sings “Imagine there’s no Heaven,” everyone’s joyous laughter fills the room!

But might Jesus show up at your party, too? We recognize people in the afterlife by their personal spiritual energies, and not so much by the way they look. And our vastly treasured, so very precious Friend Jesus has personal energies so powerful that for the rest of us who are not nearly so spiritually advanced as He is, even to be very close to Him can be uncomfortable. So instead, before our party began, perhaps we  went with a few friends to visit Jesus on His riverbank, to receive His blessing. And wonderfully, He invited us to stay for a while to feed His fish with him, to pat his deer, and to tell Him how we are enjoying our having lately come home. And wow, then we did truly feel blessed indeed!

Someday you’ll see me floating in the sunshine,
My head sticking out from a low flying Cloud.
You’ll hear me call you,
Singing through the sunshine, sweet and near as can be.
Come to me, here am I, Come to me!
If you try, you’ll find me where the sky meets the sea.
Hear am I, your special island! Come to me, come to me.
Bali Ha’i, Bali Ha’i, Bali Ha’i!
– Richard Rodgers (1902-1979) & Oscar Hammerstein II (1895-1960), from “Bali Ha’i” (1949)

(This is the second of five blog posts which together help to explain the death process, how the greater reality works, and what eternal life is like.)

 

(Many photos are from Vecteezy.com) 

Going Home (Part One)

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

Amazing grace! how sweet the sound,
That saved a wretch like me!
I once was lost, but now am found,
Was blind, but now I see.

’Twas grace that taught my heart to fear,
And grace my fears relieved;
How precious did that grace appear
The hour I first believed! 

The Lord hath promised good to me,
His word my hope secures;
He will my shield and portion be
As long as life endures.
– John Newton (1725–1807), from “Amazing Grace” (1779)

I had thought that talking about what happens at death, and how it actually feels to die, has been pretty much done to death here by now (please pardon the pun). But people in the class that I am currently teaching have suggested to me that, oh no, the death process from the perspective of those who are making that universal journey is something that we haven’t talked about here nearly enough. So if those who have requested this post feel that way, then we ought to talk again about death, because unless you know all about this process, you are likely to feel apprehensive about it. And really, you shouldn’t worry about death at all! Because the fun of dying is the most glorious time of your life. And other than being born, the whole precious rite of passage for each of us back into eternity is the most universally human thing that is going to happen to us all.

Fortunately, thanks to some gifted physical mediums who lived around the turn of the twentieth century, at this point a great deal is known about the usual death process, about the genuine afterlife, and also about the very few things that might go wrong in what is supposed to be an easy and natural process. Let’s call these possible problems “traps for the unwary”, because if you learn in advance what is supposed to happen, you should be able to avoid nearly all of these problems. And thanks to the pioneering twentieth-century work of Dr. Max Planck and our visionary friend, Nikola Tesla, and then also special thanks to the painstaking research of such modern notables as Dr. R. Craig Hogan and a number of others, a lot is known now about the greater reality that we all are going to re-enter at death, and in which we spend most of our eternal lives. So, yes indeed, I guess that it really is time! Let’s all talk again about humankind’s great universal journey that happens at the end of this life on earth.

The first thing for all of us to realize is that almost nothing about our lives on earth is random, and that includes the timing and the manner of our deaths. When we plan our lives before our births, we also plan into them two or three possible exit points that our higher consciousness can choose to take, once we have wrung as much value as we can from our days on earth during this brief lifetime. For most of us, our primary purpose on earth will have been to have achieved as much spiritual growth as possible. For some, though, there may also have been a teaching component for ourselves planned into this lifetime, or a mentoring component, or a writing component, or something else that we came to earth to do; but in any event, once all your purposes have been completed, or else once your higher self has determined that it will not be possible to achieve any more in this lifetime, then your higher consciousness will decide that it is time to go home.

That “higher consciousness”, by the way, is the sixty to seventy percent of your eternal mind that you left behind when you entered this lifetime. You stripped down to just a subset of your eternal mind that is designed and energized for rapid learning! But you will reunite with the rest of your mind almost as soon as you return home, and you will be amazed to discover how much smarter your eternal self actually is.  Please note, too, that you are unlikely to be consciously aware at first that your higher self has made the big decision that it is time to go home.

Your higher self can choose almost any mode of weakening or damaging your body so you can exit this lifetime, some of which causes of death may not obviously look to anyone to have been a planned sort of bodily exit at all. For example, we are told that even nearly all “accidental” deaths are in fact deaths at planned exit points. But certainly, to fall ill with cancer or another rapidly fatal illness is the sort of exit that your higher consciousness planned into this lifetime. Dying in your nineties because your body cannot support life any longer is also kind of a no-brainer pre-planned exit. But, one way or another, about one calendar year before your pre-planned death, your life will begin to wind itself down. You are likely not to be much aware of this fact on a conscious level, but those at the celebration of your life held afterward are likely to be full of stories about how they heard from you suddenly two months ago, after many years apart. Or a spouse will recount that a few weeks before your fatal auto accident, you sat him down and told him where your household cash drawer is and where your jewelry is hidden; or the week before your fatal heart attack, you handed your wife a sheet of paper with all the bank account numbers and the safety deposit box combination and secret codes to whatever your family owns written on it. I hear these surprising winding-up stories from people all the time.

So, the period leading up to your death is likely to be orderly and well-planned, even whether or not you are consciously aware of planning it. And your material body has an instinct for its own survival, so it is going to fight to avoid declining in health; which means that your decline will likely be gradual and sporadic, especially if you are younger, and with periods of reprieve built into it. And of course, if your death is not at a planned exit point, if it truly is an accident like a drowning, a death in war, or a murder, then most of what happens in a natural planned death is unlikely to apply in your case. In most such unplanned deaths, you are likely to find yourself just unexpectedly alone outside your body and feeling immaterial, perhaps looking dazedly at your inert material body. If this happens to you, call for help! Those who have been there and done that will report to us that right away, a tall and glowing being comes running. He or she apologizes for not having been there to help at once, and often others will join that first being. Then you will be whisked away to the third level of the astral plane, which is the entrance level to the afterlife, and there you will be joyously welcomed home.

But if yours is a more regular death at a planned exit point, your material body will likely need to go through a process of weakening over months, or even over years of time before it will be willing to give up its non-material inhabitant. Your material body might be barely functional by the time your actual planned death approaches, but eventually there will come a day when your body no longer can hold on to you. So then at last your death can begin.

The first thing that you will be likely to notice, a day or two or even as much as a week or more before your body actively begins to die, is the presence of beloved people that you used to think were dead, simply appearing in the upper corners of the room. Sometimes they will speak, but perhaps at first they just will be there; and perhaps one or more of them will step down and join you, but just as often they will simply stay where they are in the room’s upper corners and they will begin to talk to you in your mind from there. One or more of them might even be treasured pets! These have been judged to be the deceased loved ones that you are most likely to trust, and to follow. And the first sight of these loved ones, looking to be no more than in their twenties now, healthy and happy and solid, is going to banish every remaining fear from your mind. If you are at a dying loved one’s bedside, you might enjoy sharing some of these wonderful moments as the deathbed visitors first arrive; more often, though, as these visitors arrive, the dying cease to communicate with the living altogether.

We know, too, that a dying patient who might even have been comatose, perhaps for years, can sometimes now become alert and aware and even talkative again. This amazing phenomenon is called “terminal lucidity,” and it can include some extraordinary phenomena, even a full awakening, sitting up in bed, and normal or nearly normal communication with those who are at the bedside. When a dying person has been in a coma or has a severely damaged brain and has been unable to communicate for many years, for that person suddenly to seem normal, even for many hours, in the period just before death seems impossible! And yet, it is thought now that terminal lucidity likely happens in most cases when people with damaged brains, or people who were comatose before death begin the active dying process without much sedation in their systems. So, why does it happen?

The planned natural death process is highly predictable. Our bodies while we are on earth are built like a set of nested Matryoshka dolls. The outermost layer is a transparent energy shield that protects us from various kinds of negativity, and can actually be seen by sensitive people to barely shimmer and glow with one or more colors. Then comes the material body, which is dying now and will be left behind; and finally, there is the inner energy body. That inner energy body is you; it is who you actually are, and is what is about to go home. That body at first begins to separate from the head and the extremities of your material body. As it does that, you become free of your material brain, et voila! If your mind has been trapped by a damaged brain, you might enter a brief period of terminal lucidity as your energy body separates, when you will be unexpectedly able to interact with those around your bed. Meanwhile, your inner energy body is gradually continuing to separate from inside your material body, in a process that feels like a lot of tiny threads breaking. It doesn’t hurt at all, but it does feel funny.

Once your inner energy body has entirely separated from your material body, it gathers inside your material chest. By now, you have stopped communicating with those around the bed, and your personal vibration is rising rapidly. Then your energy body rises from your material body, occasionally from the top of the head but most often from the chest, and some sensitive people at the bedside can actually see this as what looks like a gray mist rising for a couple of feet and then seeming to disappear. What actually happens is that the mist, which is you, simply rises in vibration higher than what any living people can see, and it reforms into a naked body in the air which is still attached to your material body by your silver cord. There is no pain in any of this. Nothing about dying is painful, or has much sensation to it; in fact, sometime in the final days or even weeks before actual death, and even for cancer sufferers, pain seems to largely disappear altogether. The only strong sensation reported is that many who have died report a sensation upon first  leaving that boat-anchor of a dying body of almost unbearable joy. Your dead loved ones who have come to take you home all gather around to hug you now as your body reforms in the air, and everyone is happy and laughing, while you of course now notice your lack of clothing, and you hurriedly mentally clothe yourself. This is such a joyous time!

Meanwhile, your silver cord, which during your life on earth has been stretchy enough t0 let your energy body travel to the edge of the universe while your body slept if you ever had a mind to do that, has begun to fray. And then it breaks, and your body on the bed breathes its last. This is a moment of danger for you, since your instinct might be to try to comfort your loved ones around the bed who are distressed at your material death. But you cannot help them now, since it is impossible for them to see or hear you! And if you try to get their attention to show them that you have survived, you will lower your own vibration so you will no longer be able to perceive those who have come to take you home. That is how we make ghosts! No, instead you must resolutely join your mother, your aunt and uncle, and your childhood pet dog, as together your vibrations rise even more.

(We might just note here that the silver cord is a faintly bluish energy cord that was first mentioned in the Old Testament Book of Ecclesiastes. It connects your material body to your inner energy body, viz: “Remember Him before the silver cord is broken and the golden bowl is crushed, the pitcher by the well is shattered and the wheel at the cistern is crushed; 7 then the dust will return to the earth as it was, and the spirit will return to God who gave it” [Eccl 12:6-7].)

The most amazing thing about entering the afterlife at your death is that you will find that it is right in the same place where you died! But it’s just at a slightly higher rate of vibration. So, dying is as simple as changing TV channels. As your joyous loved ones surround you and your childhood dog licks your hand, all of you together are entering a brief gray fog. You glance back at your deathbed scene, and you can see that it is all looking vague and vapory now. And as you watch, it simply disappears, and that gray fog briefly surrounds all of you. But ahead of you, things are growing brighter and brighter. And to your amazement, as the fog around you thins, what dawns ahead and around you is the most glorious possible whole new world.

When we’ve been there ten thousand years,
Bright shining as the sun,
We’ve no less days to sing God’s praise
Than when we first begun.
– John Newton (1725–1807), from “Amazing Grace” (1779)

(This is the first of fice blog posts which together help to explain the death process, how the greater reality works, and what eternal life is like.)

 

(Many photos are from Vecteezy.com)

 

God and You

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

I will lift up my eyes to the mountains;
From where shall my help come?
2 My help comes from the Lord,
Who made heaven and earth.
3 He will not allow your foot to slip;
He who keeps you will not slumber.
4 Behold, He who keeps Israel
Will neither slumber nor sleep.

5 The Lord is your keeper;
The Lord is your shade on your right hand.
6 The sun will not smite you by day,
Nor the moon by night.
7 The Lord will protect you from all evil;
He will keep your soul.
8 The Lord will guard your going out and your coming in
From this time forth and forever.
Psalm 121 (A Song of Ascents; A Psalm of David), ca 1000 BCE

For much of my life, I never could find a way to feel close to God. I think my problem was mostly that the God that we meet in Christian churches is so distant, so gigantic, and so frankly scary. That Christian God gave us strict rules that he had delivered to Moses on stone tablets on the top of a mountain. And omigod, we had better follow that Christian God’s rules, or else our eternal destiny will be to fry alive and screaming in a literal hell forevermore! Please pause and think about this for a moment. What Christianity actually seems to be telling us is that human reality before the sacrifice of Jesus was something like a kind of pre-electronics video game being played by some sadistic being with a long, white beard. Isn’t that the way it actually seems to you, too? The Christian God created all of us, and he also made the rules for us to live by. Very strict rules, those Ten Commandments! Then when anybody breaks a Commandment, he gets a black mark against his name in God’s book, called a “Sin.” So then as soon as our body dies, if we have committed a bad enough Sin during life, God picks us up in two gigantic fingers, and God drops us, alive again and screaming, into a gigantic lake of fire. Isn’t that how the Christian deal with God’s rules and hell before Jesus eventually became involved appears to have worked?

My experience of light at the age of eight probably made all of this feel especially real to me. I knew that none of it was just a story, but like that light, that scary God was real! But to put a better face on this, I also knew that the Christian God had sent Jesus. The Jesus in the stained-glass window below was actually quite large and vivid, and I clung to Him every Sunday of my childhood. And I know now that it was my spirit guide, Thomas, that I was always feeling in my life when I was a child, and I was very fortunate in that way; because without Thomas always there and loving me and talking to me in my mind, I think my fear of God in childhood would have been crippling. But as it was, I always had Thomas’s comforting hand to hold.

So in any event, as Christianity tells the story, God was merciful to God’s creation and sent us Jesus. God’s only begotten Son took upon Himself every one of our Sins, past and future, and then died horribly on the cross as our ultimate sacrifice to God for all our Sins, once and for all. So now, thank God, we hopelessly unworthy souls are cleansed and made worthy, and we feel miserably guilty and indebted forevermore. But at least, provided that we choose the right one of the forty-thousand-odd versions of Christianity which are now extant, and also assuming that we obey the rules of that right version of Christianity, we will not be going to hell after all. Of course, with Catholicism at least you can always buy your way out of hell. Rumor has it that Frank Sinatra paid the Vatican ten million dollars to ensure that his elevator would be going up and not down. Fortunately he was not a Calvinist! For Calvin, since God knows everything, God must always know even before we are born who is going to be saved and who is going to be damned, and your elevator’s direction is predetermined before you are born so you can’t even buy your way out. What does that Christian doctrine alone tell you about the way the made-up Christian God is imagined to pervertedly think?

And yes, of course the Christian God was human-created and designed to be terrifying, but that is true of every god that has been imposed upon humankind by every religion. From very ancient times, religions have been human-created and then used to control the masses, so all the gods always have had at their base the power that an angry god needs so it can properly punish us. Horrific punishment and eternal reward are every god’s imaginary tools. Of course, over time Christianity has enhanced the hell that it invented, first making that hell eternal, then adding features such as condemning unbaptized infants to it, and then later even allowing those unbaptized infants to ascend from hell for a moment in order to see the happy eternal lives in heaven that are enjoyed by baptized infants, and all so grieving parents would bestir themselves and hurry to pay their priests to baptize their newborns that were about to die. Fear has been at the center of every religion since humankind first invented the notion of having any kind of god at all.

So it is no wonder that Jesus came to earth two thousand years ago. Jesus came to free us from religions altogether, and to free us from even the very concept of religions so He could at last introduce to us the Genuine God. Funny, isn’t it, that the Christian religion that was invented by the Roman Emperor Constantine three hundred years after Jesus rose from the dead made nothing of the two real reasons why Jesus actually tells us that He came to earth? Far from starting yet one more religion and creating yet one more false god, Jesus insists that He came to earth to end all religions, and to introduce to us the one true God. But the genuine God would not have been of any use to the Roman Emperor Constantine, since except for naked power, the genuine God has none of the attributes that we always have ascribed to any of our human-created gods. The genuine God is never angry, never judges, never punishes, and never plays games with our minds and our lives at all. The genuine God treats each one of us with infinite love and with a kind of awe, with a reverence and respect that it is difficult for anyone who ever has set foot inside any Christian church even to imagine. And I only know this because I have spent so much time in studying the afterlife, which actually is what amounts to our true eternal home, and is so dense with the love of God that God is both the air and the light.

It has for a while been clear to me why Jesus came to earth when He did, and also what He came to earth to accomplish. But I have not until lately been really sure until I studied a bit of Jewish history that the God who seemed to be calling to and working with humankind so long ago, who spoke to David and Elijah and some of the other greats back then, actually was indeed the Genuine God.  But it does seem quite clear to me now that, yes, that period of Hebrew history a thousand years or so before the birth of Jesus was in fact the true God’s earliest appearance to humankind. Which was why Judea and the area around Jerusalem was where Jesus later chose to be born. Then at last Jesus could introduce to us the one true God!

To recap for emphasis, here is some of what we know is NOT true about God, and also about Jesus’s mission on earth:

  • The true God is never angry, petty, jealous, or judgmental. Jesus Himself tells us that God never judges us when Jesus says, “For not even the Father judges anyone, but He has given all judgment to the Son, so that all will honor the Son even as they honor the Father” (JN 5:22-23).
  • The true God never appears in human form. The fact that God never appears as a human being is true even in the astral plane, and in the afterlife, which is one reason why Jesus refers to God as “the Holy Spirit.”
  • Jesus did not die for our sins. No, Jesus’s death on the cross had an entirely different purpose! Think about it. If Jesus had come to us to die for our sins, then He would not have needed to bother to rise again from the dead, now, would He? No, of course not! Merely His death would have been enough to complete the sacrifice. No, but Jesus died on the cross and then rose from the dead in order to prove to His contemporaries, and to us, that human life really is eternal, and that our own deaths will not end our lives. No one would have believed Him otherwise.

If you understand what Jesus actually was doing during His life on earth, the evidence for Jesus’s genuine mission is everywhere in the Biblical Gospels! To cite a few examples:

Jesus despised clergy and religious leaders. Among many other things, He said:

“Beware of the false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly are ravenous wolves. You will know them by their fruits. Grapes are not gathered from thorn bushes nor figs from thistles, are they? So every good tree bears good fruit, but the bad tree bears bad fruit. A good tree cannot produce bad fruit, nor can a bad tree produce good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.  So then, you will know them by their fruits” (MT 7:15-20).

“Woe to you religious lawyers! For you have taken away the key of knowledge; you yourselves did not enter, and you hindered those who were entering” (LK 11:52).

“But woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, because you shut off the kingdom of heaven from people; for you do not enter in yourselves, nor do you allow those who are entering to go in” (MT 23:13).

Jesus hated religious traditions. To give you just two examples, He said: 

“Neglecting the commandment of God, you hold to the tradition of men… You are experts at setting aside the commandment of God in order to keep your tradition” (MK 7:8-9).

“Why do you transgress the commandment of God for the sake of your tradition?… You hypocrites! Rightly did Isaiah prophesy of you: ‘This people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far away from me. But in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the precepts of men’” (MT 15:3-9).

Jesus was disgusted by displays of religiosity. He said:

“Beware of practicing your righteousness before men to be noticed by them; otherwise, you have no reward with your Father who is in heaven. So, when you give to the poor, do not sound a trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, so that they may be honored by men. Truly I say to you, they have their reward in full. But when you give to the poor, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving will be in secret; and your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.

 “When you pray, you are not to be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and on the street corners so that they may be seen by men. Truly I say to you, they have their reward in full.  But you, when you pray, go into your inner room, close your door and pray to your Father who is in secret, and your Father who sees what is done in secret will reward you” (MT 6:1-6).

In all things, Jesus was speaking for the Genuine God! When Jesus was asked what was the greatest commandment, He didn’t name any of those old Ten Commandments. Right? Instead, He said, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the great and foremost commandment.  The second is like it, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments depend the whole Law and the Prophets” (MT 22:37-40). Since “The Law and the Prophets” was how the Hebrews of Jesus’s day referred to what we now call the entire Old Testament, in one splendid stroke Jesus hereby replaced the entire Hebrew holy book of His day, and arguably also that whole ancient god’s grotesque video game notion of Sin as well, with one singular, glorious command: Love God, and love your fellow man with everything that is in you!

We know that when Jesus spoke of “the Holy Spirit,” He was not speaking of some separate Being. No, the Holy Spirit is just the spirit of God indwelling in each of us. This was made clear when Jesus repeatedly said things like, “If you then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask Him?” (LK 11:13) And, “Everyone who speaks a word against the Son of Man, it will be forgiven him; but he who blasphemes against the Holy Spirit, it will not be forgiven him” (LK 12:10), which proves that the Holy Spirit dwelling in each of us is indeed the genuine God, while Jesus, the Son of Man, tells us that He is not God. Not quite. But, can it really be so simple?

Oh yes, indeed it can! Earthly Christian leaders speak of a “Trinity”, but God is nothing so complicated as a Trinity. God is Everything and All There Is. Because the Genuine God is Consciousness, there is in fact literally nothing that God is not. But since God understands that you and I have such a strong sense of our own littleness while we are encased in these material bodies, God has conceived for us the concept of the Holy Spirit, which is in fact all of God but just human-sized and able to dwell within us for our earthly lives. Of course, God is within you now and God has been within you for your entire life, since there is nowhere that God is not. But perhaps the Emperor Constantine’s Christianity has convinced you that you are a Sinner. Perhaps you worry that you might have driven God away from you by something you ever might have done?

Well then, it is time right now to invite God back into your life, to stay! Simply close your eyes, take a hopeful breath, and with Jesus right there with you, where Jesus always is for you whenever you simply speak His name, just say, “Dear God, I love You with all my heart, and I receive from You now the Holy Spirit.”  

6 With what shall I come to the Lord,
And bow myself before the God on high?
Shall I come to Him with burnt offerings,
With yearling calves?
7 Does the Lord take delight in thousands of rams,
In ten thousand rivers of oil?
Shall I present my firstborn for my rebellious acts,
The fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?
8 He has told you, O man, what is good;
And what does the Lord require of you
But to do justice, to love kindness,
And to walk humbly with your God?
Micah of Moresheth (Micah 6:6-8), ca 700 BCE

God and Science

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

There was a time in my life
I thought I had to do it all myself.
And I didn’t know the grace of God was sufficient,
And I didn’t know the love of God was at hand.

But now I can say, If you are discouraged,
Struggling just to make it through another day,
You got to let it go, let it all go,
And this is what you have to say:

I release and I let go, I let the Spirit run my life,
And my heart is open wide, Yes, it’s only up to God!
No more struggle, no more strife, With my faith I see the light.
I am free in the Spirit, Yes, it’s only up to God!
– Rev Michael Beckwith, from “I Release and I Let Go” (1990).

My father-in-law died of Alzheimer’s disease in 1998. My mother-in-law used to visit him every day, but one day she was arrested and taken off the road because she had eluded four police cars in a long and very low-speed chase on a two-lane road with roof lights blazing, which is actually a funny story: she later told me that she didn’t stop for them because she was so sure that she had done nothing wrong, so then they had to force her off the road and they took away her license. At that point, I began to visit Dad daily on my way home from work. He was comatose and very near death, he no longer knew who any of us was, so we thought he wouldn’t mind not having her visiting him every day. But late on one afternoon, to my surprise, I stepped into my father-in-law’s nursing home room, and I found him lying there wide awake and looking right at me. I sat down at his bedside, and I spoke to him slowly and clearly. He locked his eyes on mine. Amazingly, he was fully awake and aware! He said to me, “Bobbi, you know I’m still in here, right?” I about fell off my chair. Two days later, my father-in-law died.

What was happening to him was actually a well-recognized phenomenon called “terminal lucidity.” And it is surprisingly common among people like my husband’s late father, whose  brains have been fried by disease or damage. They will often come fully to their senses again as they approach their deaths, when they will then be able to speak quite normally. Scientists have no explanation at all for terminal lucidity, other than to try to claim that of course it is impossible, so that proves that it must never happen. But you and I realize that of course terminal lucidity makes perfect sense. As our bodies are dying, our internal energy bodies will begin to separate from the material bodies that we will be leaving behind, in a process that can take many hours to complete. And as this happens, our energy minds will blessedly separate first of all from the material brains which once served us well, but which now are badly damaged. And as our energy minds separate from our damaged brains, we can have a blessed few hours, or even as much as a day or two while our energy bodies are still separating from our material bodies. It is then that dying people’s energy minds can interact with the living and they can speak quite normally.

This is a fact that only an afterlife research scientist really can understand. To no other scientist does it make such clear sense. I guess it is past time for us to accept the fact that we are at an odd juncture in world history, when by default we have divided the field of scientific research into three categories, based upon the limiting dogmas that we have long since senselessly imposed upon some research scientists, who of course should have no limiting dogmas at all. A dogma is defined as “a principle or set of principles laid down by an authority as incontrovertibly true.” And currently, there are three groups of research scientists working worldwide who are trying to understand major aspects of reality, and who can be divided by the dogmas which stupidly limit how some of them are required to operate:

  • Mainstream Scientists are trying to understand everything about reality, but their work is to this day nonsensically limited by the dogma that they are not allowed to discover that there is any divine intelligence at all involved in the creation or in the maintenance of reality.
  • Christianity-Funded Scientists also are trying to understand everything about reality, but they are ideally supposed to discover that the intelligence that is by now clearly and incontrovertibly obvious behind the creation and maintenance of reality will turn out to be the Christian God.
  • Afterlife Research Scientists are not formally trained scientists and are governed by no dogmas, but those few of us who exist have developed considerable scientific knowledge and understanding in the process of studying more than two hundred years of abundant and consistent afterlife evidence.

For trained scientists in the first two categories, of course, their sources of funding are their primary limiters. If you want to work in association with any  university or other funded research institute, then you must hew to that research institute’s governing dogmas, or else you cannot work at all. So scientists in the first category are not allowed to even imagine the possibility of any sort of life after death. Their “core scientific dogma of materialism,” which was informally but rigidly put into place soon after the year 1900 in all the leading university science departments worldwide, will not let traditionally-trained and -funded research scientists consider even the possibility of life after death, even if they might find some tantalizing evidence in favor of the possibility of life after death and they might want to pursue that evidence. More and more, that core materialist dogma restricts them as severely as an artist would be restricted if he was forced to spend his entire career avoiding using the color yellow. And terminal lucidity is a great example of how their materialist dogma restricts their work! Terminal lucidity clearly does happen, and it happens very frequently. Some estimates now suggest that it is a nearly universal phenomenon when people with damaged brains are in the process of dying without heavy sedation. It is therefore highly embarrassing for mainstream scientists to be prevented by their utterly nonsensical materialist dogma from admitting the frank truth of terminal lucidity.

It is only in recent years that we who do any work in the field of afterlife research have come to realize that we are scientists, but indeed scientists is what we are. Although we are scientists of the very old school, perhaps, and entirely self-taught. But there is such an overwhelming amount of afterlife evidence, and in order for us to make sense of any of it, we have had to do a lot of related fill-in research as well. Where is this gigantic and entirely consistent greater reality that we are discovering, to which we all seem to return at death? How does it actually work, and how does it fit with the very limited material reality that we perceive around us during our brief earthly lives? My goodness, it turns out that you really cannot know anything at all until you are able to figure out pretty much everything, so for Craig Hogan and me and a very few others, making sense of all of it eventually by about 2010 or earlier became our obsession. We did finally figure it all out; but wow, doing that has not been easy!

It has, however, been extremely rewarding. For one thing, we have had tremendous help from people like Max Planck and Nikola Tesla, the great quantum physicist and the legendary polymath respectively of the first half of the twentieth century. Without their insights in particular, we never could have figured it out at all! And the scientists driven by a Christian calling at the Discovery Institute in Seattle, Washington, are our brothers from another mother, as our dear inner city kin might say, in that the Discovery Institute’s scientists are hoping to find specifically a Christian God behind it all; but still, in seeking an Intelligent Designer, they are heading in our same direction. I read their newsletters with avid interest, and I find a lot there that we can use.

One big problem for scientists who are forced to spend their entire materialist-dogma-squashed careers in that first category listed above is the fact that we few afterlife scientists, together with many in the second category listed above, are now blowing solidity away altogether, as you will shortly see. When you do your scientific research with a fully open mind, it is amazing what you can discover! It was somewhere before 2010 that we scientists in the third category listed above came to realize that all of material reality is Consciousness. The afterlife evidence, when taken all together, will admit of no other explanation. And as Max Planck said in 1931, “I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness! Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.” And as Nikola Tesla said around the same time, “The day science begins to study non-physical phenomena, it will make more progress in one decade than in all the previous centuries of its existence.” We truly do follow in the footsteps of Giants!

But then by about 2020, mainstream scientists were coming to very strongly (but sadly) suspect that they never are going to figure everything out. How can their brand of science in the end ever amount to much, when more than a century ago their establishment of their materialist dogma turned it into nothing more than the useless religion of atheism? I have not seen any article in any popular science magazine where they seemed to be considering overtly admitting that holding to materialism ever was a stupid idea. Oh no. Just, now they think that perhaps not everything in reality is going to be discoverable by scientists. And, you know, that still seems to be okay with them, even now.

Around 2020 was also the year when the illustrious young free-minded Dutch scientist Dr. Bernardo Kastrup was delivering his wonderful second Ph.D. defense, on philosophy of mind and ontology. See also his book, The Idea of the World: A Multi-Disciplinary Argument For the Mental Nature of Reality. Like the illustrious Dr. Kastrup, the more we afterlife researchers have come to understand how life after death actually works, and how this reality and the many separate but closely interrelated afterlife realities all fit together, the more we have come to realize that all the realities, including this one, are actually non-solid! Moreover, against all the odds, this particular universe turns out to be actually and amazingly finely tuned for life. And more amazingly still, as the great Rupert Sheldrake tells us in his famously banned Tedx talk called “The Science Delusion”, all the “Cosmological Constants” that keep this universe stable are constantly and minutely adjusting. And then there is the further curious fact that all of what even is supposedly “solid” matter is 99.9999999% empty space. The more we study the greater reality, the more fully we come to understand that all the hundreds of solid-seeming levels of what we understand to be the realities that we enter at death, all of which vibrate ever higher than this entirely illusory non-material and only material-seeming reality that we think we are experiencing around us now, are simply aspects of Consciousness. Indeed, our only possible conclusion becomes inescapable. What we think of as human Consciousness really is all there is. We afterlife scientific researchers have discovered the genuine God.

During all the decades that I have been doing afterlife research, there have been more and more situations like that moment when my hopelessly fried father-in-law looked at me, and he was normal. And so then I have found yet one more impossible thing which was confoundingly true. Now, please understand that I am a skeptic by nature! I cannot believe anything without first fighting it. But I also emphatically refuse to hold to anyone’s dogma in doing my research, which has often made it possible for me to figure something out where trained scientists would find just another dead end. And to be frank, I find this whole situation to be increasingly amazing and utterly confounding. Or to use the only word that really seems to fit, I find the whole field of eternal human life research to be absolutely miraculous.   

And the most miraculous thing is that, I swear, it all fits together in a puzzle far greater than the size of this universe, and so perfectly that not a single piece is out of place. And it never had to turn out this way! Not at all! When I first began to do afterlife research more than fifty years ago, I knew that the odds were long against our finding from here a perfectly detailed picture of a genuine afterlife so true and real that we could be certain about each detail of it, from the way the grass would look and feel in the astral plane, right down to the pattern that would be on the genuine God’s astral teacup. Of course, a non-material God does not drink tea; but otherwise, we are pretty much there.

I remember now that when I was four, we learned in nursery school to recite our home address in case we might ever get lost. And as that school was teaching me each morning to memorize my home address, in the empty lot next to our house, there was a tall and friendly man with long hair wearing a long robe who would walk with me sometimes in the afternoons, holding my hand and also teaching me things. My beloved Thomas tells me now that of course he was that man, and he adds that no one else could have seen him. I recall, too, that as we walked, he was adding to the home address that I was learning to recite in school each morning, “the world, the universe, and the Mind of God.”  

I release and I let go, I let the Spirit run my life,
And my heart is open wide, Yes, it’s only up to God!
No more struggle, no more strife, With my faith I see the light.
I am free in the Spirit, Yes, it’s only up to God!
– Rev Michael Beckwith, from “I Release and I Let Go” (1990).

God and Happiness

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

Who can I turn to when nobody needs me?
My heart wants to know, and so I must go where destiny leads me.
With no star to guide me, and no one beside me,
I’ll go on my way and, after the day, the darkness will hide me.

And maybe tomorrow I’ll find what I’m after.
I’ll throw off my sorrow, beg, steal, or borrow my share of laughter.
With you, I could learn to. With you, what a new day!
But who can I turn to if you turn away?
– Leslie Bricusse (1931-2021) & Anthony Newley (1931-1999) from “Who Can I Turn to?” (1964)

When my much-beloved Thomas told me that “God and Happiness” was to be our topic for this week, I told him he had to be kidding me. Long ago I became convinced that happiness is mostly genetic: you either are blessed with the happiness gene, or else – too bad – you simply don’t have it. And my mother had a double dose of it. Whatever was going on in her life, she immediately made the best of it, she rearranged matters to better suit herself and those she loved, and she never looked back or had a moment’s regret. I cannot recall her face without a smile on it, nor a moment when she ever cried in her life except when her own mother died. And speaking of her parents, they were poor Danish immigrants to America at the turn of the twentieth century, who, also true to their wonderful genes, were always happy and always in love with one another, no matter what might be going on in their lives.

Come to think of it, Denmark generally is ranked to be the second happiest country on earth, while Finland – which is another Scandinavian country – is routinely ranked as the happiest. So the fact that my genetic ancestry is Danish would suggest that of course I would find being always happy to be especially easy. You cannot read these articles about the happiest countries year after year without suspecting that raw genetics must have at least some considerable part to play in human happiness. I recall my poor Danish immigrant grandfather, who never in his life that I could see had very much to be happy about, and yet I cannot recall ever seeing him without a merry grin as he went about his days. Now, there was a genuine Dane for you!

And I cannot recall even one day in my life before I entered college and met a few moody teenagers when I even knew how being unhappy might feel. My childhood and youthful states of mind ranged from being mildly delighted to unexpected outright bursts of joy. And really, to be frank, for no reason at all: just because of the way the light was falling, the sound of the wind, or the sight of a bird outside my window. I have always been happy. Happiness is not a virtue, after all, but rather it is an extraordinary gift.  And as I have progressed through life and married, reared children, studied the afterlife and also studied the Gospels; and then, OMG, as I have met my beloved Thomas and then actually even met Jesus in person, my life has only grown happier still. I have always been the happiest person I knew, and always by what seemed to be utter happenstance.

So I think of myself as the last person in the world who should be giving anyone advice about how to be happy! I have no idea why, but like my mother and grandfather, I am always fundamentally delighted with life, and for no particular reason. Anyway, we have blogged on the topic of Happiness twice already in just this calendar year: once in May, when I think we discussed the subject pretty definitively; and before that in January, when Thomas was worked up about the morning when he and I first met two thousand years ago, and then we died together during a Roman massacre of Jesus’s earliest followers. I thought the subject of Happiness had by now been largely done to death in this space!

“So, okay,” I told my Thomas on Friday morning. “We’ve already done Happiness, so we now have nothing to write about.” He said sharply, “Read the title again. Your topic here is ‘God and Happiness’. And by the way,” he added, sounding cranky, “I do not believe for one moment that there is such a thing as a ‘happiness gene’, so come up with a better explanation than that.” Well, okay then!

Since Thomas wouldn’t let me off the hook with a new last-minute topic, and since he didn’t feel like helping me with this one, I asked God to please give me someplace to start. And God first sent me to Psalm 46. which was written and sung more than seven hundred years before the birth of Jesus. It reminds us that:

God is our refuge and strength,
A very present help in times of trouble.
2 Therefore we will not fear, though the earth should change
And though the mountains slip into the heart of the sea;
3 Though its waters roar and foam,
Though the mountains quake at its swelling pride.

4 There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God,
The holy dwelling places of the Most High.
5 God is in the midst of her, she will not be moved;
God will help her when morning dawns.
6 The nations made an uproar, the kingdoms tottered;
He raised His voice, the earth melted.
7 The Lord of hosts is with us;
The God of Jacob is our stronghold.

8 Come, behold the works of the Lord,
Who has wrought desolations in the earth.
9 He makes wars to cease to the end of the earth;
He breaks the bow and cuts the spear in two;
He burns the chariots with fire.
10 “Be still, and know that I am God;
I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth.”
11 The Lord of hosts is with us;
The God of Jacob is our stronghold. (Psalm 46:1-11)

Such a beautiful Psalm! “Be still, and know that I am God. I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth.” So stop fretting, My beloved little child, and stop all your worrying, for you have a Divine Eternal Father in Me; and your Father loves you, and your Father owns every power. This is the first and foremost, and indeed it is the ultimate and only reason for us ever to be happy.

I recall that when I first encountered unhappy young people in college, their entirely new mindset mystified me. I had never before seen or even imagined unhappiness. I didn’t realize until much later in life the fact that none of these depressed young folks had a relationship with God, when my own divine relationship was something that I had taken entirely for granted ever since I had my first experience of light at the age of eight. Even now, I can only try to imagine what it must have felt like to be young and not to know God, not to be certain that God is real and loves me perfectly, and therefore what it must have felt like not to be certain that my own life is forever. And, oh my god, I would have found my young life to be unbearable then, and full of cares, just as they seemed to be finding early-adult life to be for them! I feel so sorry for them now, in retrospect, and sorry that I didn’t understand them at all, and that I didn’t try to help them a great deal more than I did at the time.

Of course, our dear Jesus never had much patience for people who were not really listening to Him closely, and who were not trying to learn from Him, since they were still so completely immersed in this world’s cares. Woe betide you if you were in His crowd of followers, and you made of our Jesus an ignorant and selfish matter-based request like the one that follows:

13 Someone in the crowd called to Him, “Teacher, tell my brother to divide the family inheritance with me.” 14 But Jesus said to him, “You there, who appointed Me a judge or arbitrator over you?” 15 Then He said to them, “Beware, and be on your guard against every form of greed; for not even when one has an abundance does his life consist of his possessions.” 16 And He told them a parable, saying, “The land of a rich man was very productive. 17 And he began reasoning to himself, saying, ‘What shall I do, since I have no place to store my crops?’ 18 Then he said, ‘This is what I will do: I will tear down my barns and build larger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. 19 And I will say to myself, “You have many goods laid up for many years to come; take your ease, eat, drink and be merry.”’ 20 But God said to him, ‘You fool! This very night your soul is required of you; and now who will own what you have prepared?’ 21 So is the man who stores up treasure for himself, and is not rich toward God” (LK 12:13-21). And wow, you and I are on the edge of our seats now, aren’t we, and thinking, Tell us, Jesus! Please tell us, dear Wayshower, how we, too, can become rich toward God?

So then Jesus does indeed proceed to tell us how we can become rich toward God, using some of the most beautiful language in the whole Christian Bible. 22 And He said to His disciples, “For this reason I say to you, do not worry about your life, as to what you will eat; nor for your body, as to what you will put on. 23 For life is more than food, and the body more than clothing. 24 Consider the ravens, for they neither sow nor reap; they have no storeroom nor barn, and yet God feeds them. How much more valuable you are than the birds! 25 And which of you by worrying can add a single hour to his life’s span? 26 If then you cannot do even a very little thing, why do you worry about other matters? 27 Consider the lilies, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin; but I tell you, not even Solomon in all his glory clothed himself like one of these! 28 But if God so clothes the grass in the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the furnace, how much more will He clothe you? You men of little faith! 29 And do not seek what you will eat and what you will drink, and do not keep worrying! 30 For all these things the nations of the world eagerly seek; but your Father knows that you need these things. 31 But seek His kingdom, and these things will be added to you. 32 Do not be afraid, little flock, for your Father has chosen gladly to give you the kingdom! (LK 12:22-32)

There it is, and it is so simple! Jesus’s prescription for happiness is this: stop worrying and never be afraid, because God assures us of God’s eternal love and protection. God really does have this perfect level of happiness in store for each of us here on earth, for He tells us that even right at this moment, the kingdom of God is within each of us! (LK 17:21) And this is true both now and forevermore. This, my very dear ones, is the entire difference between being always happy in both this world and the next, and never being really happy at all, no matter what you might have and no matter what you might do. How can you ever be truly happy in this world, when at any moment you might blink out like a light? Or, worse, when at any moment you might be dropped, forever aware, into a void of nothing for eternity? As I think about it now, for those that I met in college who were truly unhappy, it was their existential terrors that were upsetting them most. Children seldom think about dying. It is only in our teens, perhaps, that these awful existential terrors start to seize us.  

So if you ever want to be truly happy in your life, then it is up to you to set yourself up with God for daily and eternal happiness! And this, my beloveds, is how you can do it:

  • Claim and own the fact that human life is eternal. If you don’t yet know that for certain, then just spend a year on seekreality.com, absorbing as much afterlife evidence as you can, until there is not a shred of doubt left in your mind. Until you are certain of the fact that it really is impossible for you ever to die, there always will be that remaining pall of existential sadness over your life.
  • Claim and own the eternal certainty of God’s love. There are a number of ways that you can do this, but perhaps the most certain way is to study Jesus’s teachings on teachingsbyjesus.com, and in Liberating Jesus and The Fun of Loving Jesus as well. Learn The Lord’s Prayer and the 23rd Psalm, and say them frequently to God as love-talk between you, while always really meaning their words. God is your personal doting Father and eternally listening. Jesus is your Wayshower and Best Friend, and God is the Father of us all.

God and Jesus are there with and within you, even now. They cannot possibly be closer to you than They already are. But they are respectful of your privacy. So they are waiting for you to say the first Hello.

Maybe tomorrow I’ll find what I’m after.
I’ll throw off my sorrow, beg, steal, or borrow my share of laughter.
With You, I could learn to. With You, what a new day!
But who can I turn to, if You turn away?
– Leslie Bricusse (1931-2021) & Anthony Newley (1931-1999) from “Who Can I Turn to?” (1964)

God and Faith

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

You who dwell in the shelter of the Lord,
Who abide in His shadow for life,
Say to the Lord, “My Refuge,
My Rock in Whom I trust.”
And He will raise you up on eagle’s wings,
Bear you on the breath of dawn,
Make you to shine like the sun!
And hold you in the palm of His Hand.

The snare of the fowler will never capture you,
And famine will bring you no fear;
Under His Wings your refuge,
His faithfulness your shield.
And He will raise you up on eagle’s wings,
Bear you on the breath of dawn,
Make you to shine like the sun!
And hold you in the palm of His Hand.
– Michael Joncas, from “On Eagle’s Wings” (1979)

Wow, did Thomas and I catch flack for some of the positions we took in our blog post last week about sin! The first, and the most obvious question was why God might let some people who have done extremely evil things off scott-free. The very thought of this possibility offended some people. “So, say that someone even kills someone else. Maybe tortures and murders a child or something. Are you saying that even the most awful crime is not necessarily a sin in the eyes of God?  So, then we would say patiently, “To the extent that something is a religious crime, which is the technical definition of a ‘sin,’ then God does not condemn us to hell for it.” Because for one thing, there is no actual hell. And more to the point, there is no judgment by God (JN 5:22). And finally, of course, religions are of man. They are not of God.  So things simply do not work the way that you and I might think that they work. But the thought that there is not some level of divine retribution for bad deeds done is still too difficult for some otherwise sensible folks to handle. Shouldn’t retribution from God for what we can see are obviously horrendous deeds be something that exists in the air somehow, like a noisome vapor that will ignite on its own and outright blow all the villains away?

Well, no. God does not think the way that people think. And as is true of so many things, it is love that makes the difference. Each of us comes to earth to live a lifetime which is usually planned to be difficult, so this earth-life can help us to ever better learn how to lift our personal energy vibrations ever farther away from fear and hatred and all the other low-level emotions, and toward our universal energy goal of ever more perfect love. Right? Isn’t that the entire point of all of human earthly existence? That is true of each of us individually, and it is true of all of humankind universally. Each of us plans a difficult lifetime that is full of what are often complex and even painful challenges. So, if one of us has done something appalling, has for example committed a horrendous murder, then he or she has already fallen pretty far away from our universal energy goal of ever more perfect love. Wouldn’t that be true? So, I know you don’t want to hear this now, but the last thing we should ever want to do in that instance would be to punish someone in some awful way, and to thereby lower his or her personal energy vibration even more!

Yes, we want to keep all such people from ever harming someone else. But ideally, we want to do it in such a way that we are teaching and reclaiming and loving as we do it! When we treat any human being harshly, and even those who are guilty of the most awful crimes, then we only lessen the aggregation of love in the world, we lower both that person’s spiritual vibration and our own, and we offer a terrible example to everyone else who is closely watching us. Until we can learn to think only as God thinks, in everything, always and forevermore, we have not even begun to learn spiritual wisdom.

While we are on the topic of trying to ever better learn to think as God thinks, let us all be sure to keep in mind the fact that no religion on earth is God’s religion. Oh, no indeed! Every one of our religions is entirely man-made. The fact that there are now some forty-five thousand different versions of Christianity alone, and some of them even battle with one another over trivialities of human-made doctrine, is therefore not surprising, even though it is frankly horrifying. I recall when I was first writing The Fun of Dying in 2010, and I Googled the question of how many versions of Christianity there were. Back then, there were ten thousand versions of Christianity. What? Ten THOUSAND? I could not get over that! I had expected the number to be something like a few hundred. And then over the following years, I have on occasion idly done that same Google search, and to my increasingly slack-jawed amazement I have watched the number of Christian denominations rapidly proliferate, until now, only fifteen years later, the number of Christian denominations worldwide is literally forty-five thousand. Many of what are called “denominations” must consist of just one church congregation. But still, think of what a travesty this is! Human beings bicker among themselves over the smallest variations in their own ideas about the tiniest details of their own faith versions. And then they inflict their personal petty disagreements on God, and also on poor Jesus.

And even so much worse, all these utterly pointless divisions among Christians still continue to proliferate, even today! The United Methodist Church has probably tried the hardest of all those endless Christian denominations to keep itself together as a big-tent unit, but in recent years it has fragmented more and more, over female clergy and over homosexuality most recently, and also over other, more trivial issues. Now, I ask you: can you imagine that the Jesus that you and I so dearly love actually gives a flying fig about issues like the genders or the sex lives of those who lead church congregations, or of their fellow church parishioners? Seriously? Can you imagine that God cares at all? Then why should the Methodist leaders care? And when you add to the terrible fragmenting of Christianity over nonsensical personal issues all the other separate religions on the earth, both large and small, most of which of course predate the earthly life of Jesus, then there are in total close to sixty thousand different ways that people might choose to worship God, or the gods, or the ineffable ether, or Mother Nature, or the Stars, or whatever else you might choose to call the Creator and the Help of all there is.

So let us now together give to God, and to every conceivable iteration of God of every name and description the arbitrary but still holy name of “God”, and let us now state just for purposes of this discussion that the One God is the God of all. As we now all understand anyway, the genuine God is what we individually experience as Consciousness, and Consciousness is all that exists. Consciousness is the Sculptor, and Consciousness is the Clay. God needs and wants no particular name, but rather God answers to whatever is in our hearts! God recognizes no religion, and the One God sees each of us as intensely and truly God’s Own. This whole religion thing is and forever only ever has been a remnant of our human-created faith-crutch. Once we simply learn to look within ourselves for the source of this ineffable call from God that every one of us feels, this core yearning, then we find its source easily! As Jesus said, the kingdom of God is within us (LK 17:21). In the end, we can easily learn to relate to God within ourselves.

Yet still, many people find that they feel best when they have some sort of religion, even now. And God does not seem to mind at all, because we live within Consciousness, within the Mind of God, so we cannot see God, since God is not a Being separate from ourselves; yet we can sense that something greater is here. So to believe in God more concretely, early people invented religions, and those first religions generally featured some often scary-awful gods. That was just how all our religions began. I guess this recent dramatic fragmentation of Christianity, which seems to have been ongoing for the past few decades, is simply the next stage of religions, wouldn’t you think? This is just the way it goes? As you know, one of the reasons why Jesus came to us two thousand years ago was to try to abolish all religions, and to teach us to relate to God individually. As human beings now become ever more individual in our relationships with God, we either are leaving our old religions altogether, or else we seem to be molding and seeking and redesigning our individual faith lives within our existing religions to ever better suit ourselves.

And our religions in their turn are either desperately becoming more draconian, as is happening with Islam; or else they are fragmenting to try to make themselves more acceptable to us, as is happening with Christianity. We note, of course, that none of this has anything to do with God, but rather it has everything to do with endlessly fallible people. In the end, it will not matter a fig what today’s religious leaders do, because to God, our notion of time does not matter, and a thousand human years is like a day. Eventually, and no matter what our religions might do, each one of us individually will learn to find our way to God, since God is always and has forever been within us all along.  

And meanwhile, there are some truly delightful people who love and encourage one another in their different religious paths. They don’t allow the fact that those paths might be considerably different from one another’s paths to be any sort of barrier at all to their building a close and loving relationship with one another, and even to their building a wonderful marriage that includes parenthood. Not endorsing any candidate here, but I consider the marriage of Vice Presidential candidate JD Vance and his Hindu wife to be nothing short of amazing and delightful! I urge you to read the linked article, because I don’t think that any attempt that I might make to summarize it could do it justice. When I married my Catholic husband fifty years ago, and we planned to have children, there was no question that I would have to convert to Catholicism. But now, this beautiful young couple can happily enter a Hindu-Catholic marriage that includes parenthood, a marriage blessed by both faiths, and there has been no thought that either of them will have to convert to the other’s religion! And around them, God’s angels sing for joy.

You need not fear the terror of the night,
Nor the arrow that flies by day.
Though thousands fall about you,
Near you it shall not come.
And He will raise you up on eagle’s wings,
Bear you on the breath of dawn,
Make you to shine like the sun!
And hold you in the palm of His Hand.

For to His angels He’s given a command,
To guard you in all of your ways.
Upon their hands they will bear you up,
Lest you dash your foot against a stone.
And He will raise you up on eagle’s wings,
Bear you on the breath of dawn,
Make you to shine like the sun!
And hold you in the palm of His Hand.
– Michael Joncas, from “On Eagle’s Wings” (1979)

God and Sin

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

Amazing grace, how sweet the sound
That saved a wretch like me!
I once was lost, but now am found.
Was blind, but now I see.

‘Twas grace that taught my heart to fear,
And grace my fears relieved;
How precious did that grace appear
The hour I first believed.
– John Newton (1725-1807), from “Amazing Grace” (1779)

Christianity is among the most punitive religions that anyone ever has imagined. As we know, all religions are man-made. And Roman Christianity, in particular, was designed by and for the Roman Emperor Constantine, as a way for him to control by fear the vast numbers of people in his empire. Constantine’s minions even invented a fake devil with powers, and a fiery hell in which Christians would burn forever for even minor sins, with “sins” being defined as infractions of religious rules. In defiance of all the laws of physics, sinners even would remain intact while burning alive in hell forever. Over time, especially sadistic Christian theologians have come up with their own especially awful refinements. Take Calvinism, for example, where God supposedly decides even before we are born who will go to heaven and who will instead burn in hell. If you are a Calvinist, you cannot know for your entire life on earth whether you are elect or you are damned, but whichever one it is, your fate is sealed before birth. No matter how much good you might do in your life, if you are a condemned Calvinist, then you will burn alive and aware in hell, regardless.  

Julian of Norwich (c.1342-1416+) was a Medieval anchoress, mystic, and seer. She has been the subject of Richard Rohr’s daily meditations during this past week, and what she received from God as the truth about sin reminds us to listen to Jesus again when Jesus talks about sin! Richard Rohr, for those who have not been following him, is a widely revered Franciscan priest who heads the Center for Action and Contemplation (the CAC) in Albuquerque, New Mexico. We should just add that an anchoress was a woman, most often a nun, who in the Middle Ages was closed into the very wall of a church, without a door but with a window into the sanctuary so she could participate in the Mass, and also with a window to the outside so she could speak to and pray with those who passed by. No one now knows Julian of Norwich’s birth-name. What she still is known for is her youthful series of visions when she was very ill – she called them “showings” – and her later in life divine revelations from God. Julian’s revelations offer a loving alternative to the strict focus on sin which characterized the Christian theology of her time. Mirabai Starr of the Center for Action and Contemplation writes:  

“Julian of Norwich is known for her radically optimistic theology. Nowhere is this better illumined than in her reflections on sin. When Julian asked God to teach her about this troubling issue, he opened his Divine Being, and all she could see there was love. Every lesser truth dissolved in that boundless ocean…. Julian confesses, ‘The truth is, I did not see any sin. I believe that sin has no substance, not a particle of being, and cannot be detected at all except by the pain it causes. It is only the pain that has substance, for a while, and it serves to purify us, and make us know ourselves and ask for mercy.’ Starr clarifies where Julian located the impact of sin: “Julian informs us that the suffering we cause ourselves through our acts of greed and unconsciousness is the only punishment we endure. God, who is All-Love, is ‘incapable of wrath.’ And so it is a complete waste of time, Julian realized, to wallow in guilt. The truly humble thing to do when we have stumbled is to hoist ourselves to our feet as swiftly as we can and rush into the arms of God, where we will remember who we really are.”

This week, when I read this divine view of sin as it was expressed by a Medieval anchoress, I was astounded. Truth to tell, God speaks to each of us in our own language! And when a few years ago I asked God how God views sin, God showed me my own infant son, about eighteen months old, with a plastic cup of milk in his hand. Maybe his cup was orange. He was standing on his stubby legs and looking up at God, who was sitting on my living room sofa, and God resembled the painting of God on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, with a long white beard. My baby and God were grinning at one another. What a beautiful moment! But then, whoopsie! The baby dropped his cup of milk, so there was milk all over the rug. My baby was surprised, and then his face puckered and he started to cry. But God laughed, so then the baby stopped crying and began to giggle. And God tousled his curly head and leaned and picked him up, and God gave him a great big hug.

And that is how God tells a twenty-first-century mother the way that God views sin. Sin feels to Me, God was saying, as it felt to you when your baby spilled milk on the living room rug. How important to you was that? And of course, I got God’s point! Yes, I wished the baby hadn’t spilled his milk because then I had to clean it up, but he was still just a spiritual baby. He would grow out of his clumsiness. In particular, with my good mothering, he would grow spiritually in love toward his union with the Godhead. I understood that God was telling me that God sees sin not as a spiritual flaw, but rather as a symptom of spiritual infancy. Sin is just something that humankind will grow beyond as we grow through lifetimes in our ability to love.

But what does Jesus say about sin? I wrote a blog post about sin a number of years ago. In fact, Jesus destroyed most of those old religious ideas about sin in one stroke! When Jesus was asked what was the greatest commandment, He didn’t name any of the Ten Commandments. Instead, He said, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the great and foremost commandment.  The second is like it, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments depend the whole Law and the Prophets” (MT 22:37-40). And He confirmed that His abandonment of religious laws was consistent with the divine plan when He said, “Do not think that I came to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I did not come to abolish, but to fulfill” (MT 5:17).

The concept of sin is grounded in mere religious laws. And remember that religions are created by people. In throwing away the Old Testament, Jesus discarded every Jewish law, so by definition, He abolished sin! But was this what He intended to do? I think the answer to this question is certainly yes! To the open-minded Gospel student, the many times that Jesus pushed aside what were then inviolate religious laws and gave us cagey reasons for His doing so look like a campaign to discredit those laws without running afoul of the listening Temple guards. Here are some examples:

“At that time Jesus went through the grainfields on the Sabbath, and His disciples became hungry and began to pick the heads of grain and eat them.  But when the Pharisees saw this, they said to Him, ‘Look, Your disciples do what is not lawful to do on a Sabbath.’ But He said to them, ‘Have you not read what David did when he became hungry, he and his companions, how he entered the house of God, and they ate the consecrated bread, which was not lawful for him to eat nor for those with him, but for the priests alone? Or have you not read in the Law, that on the Sabbath the priests in the temple break the Sabbath and are innocent? But I say to you that something greater than the temple is here! But if you had known what this means, “I desire compassion, and not sacrifice,” you would not have condemned the innocent. For the Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath.'” And the strictly religious folk of His day acted pretty much the way some Christians do now: they shamed and shunned anyone they judged to be sinful. Jesus, on the other hand, especially loved even the most unlovable! For example, we read, “And it happened that He was reclining at the table in his house, and many tax collectors and sinners were dining with Jesus and His disciples; for there were many of them, and they were following Him” (MT 2:15). He even told us why He especially loved sinners. He said, “It is not those who are healthy who need a physician, but those who are sick; I did not come to call the righteous, but sinners” (MK 2:17).

“Now all the tax collectors and the sinners were coming near Him to listen to Him. Both the Pharisees and the scribes began to grumble, saying, ‘This man receives sinners and eats with them.” So He told them this parable, saying, ‘What man among you, if he has a hundred sheep and has lost one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the open pasture and go after the one which is lost until he finds it? When he has found it, he lays it on his shoulders, rejoicing. And when he comes home, he calls together his friends and his neighbors, saying to them, “Rejoice with me, for I have found my sheep which was lost!” I tell you that in the same way, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance. Or what woman, if she has ten silver coins and loses one coin, does not light a lamp and sweep the house and search carefully until she finds it? When she has found it, she calls together her friends and neighbors, saying, “Rejoice with me, for I have found the coin which I had lost!”  In the same way, I tell you, there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents’” (LK 15:1-10).

The more you read the Lord’s Gospel words with the guess that perhaps He was abolishing the very concept of sin, the more you realize that was exactly what He was doing! Jesus had replaced the Law and the Prophets with God’s new law of love, and in doing that, He was announcing that we were ready to move above a stark and puerile thou-shalt-not morality, so then we could begin to live by a standard that is based entirely in love. Whatever we might do is no longer so important, but instead all that matters is what is in our hearts. If we have raised our spiritual vibration sufficiently that our every thought, our every impulse is based in nothing but love, then everything that we do from out of that love is good and moral by definition. And when you think about it, you realize that in fact this is a much stricter standard than any old-style law ever could be. It requires that we make no decision without first weighing it on the scales of love that are becoming ever more perfectly manifest in our hearts.

It is from this more profound base of understanding where there is only love that we come to understand why we cannot ever judge the woman who has committed adultery:

8 But Jesus went to the Mount of Olives. 2 Early in the morning He came again into the temple, and all the people were coming to Him; and He sat down and began to teach them. 3 The scribes and the Pharisees brought a woman caught in adultery, and having set her in the center of the court, 4 they said to Him, “Teacher, this woman has been caught in adultery, in the very act. 5 Now in the Law Moses commanded us to stone such women; what then do You say?” 6 They were saying this, testing Him, so that they might have grounds for accusing Him. But Jesus stooped down and with His finger wrote on the ground. 7 But when they persisted in asking Him, He straightened up, and said to them, “He who is without sin among you, let him be the first to throw a stone at her.” 8 Again He stooped down and wrote on the ground. 9 When they heard it, they began to go out one by one, beginning with the older ones, and He was left alone, and the woman, where she was, in the center of the court. 10 Straightening up, Jesus said to her, “Woman, where are they? Did no one condemn you?” 11 She said, “No one, Lord.” And Jesus said, “I do not condemn you, either. Go. From now on sin no more.” (JN 8:1-11)

How wonderful! And how very much like the vignette about my toddler son that God put into my mind when I inquired of God how God views sin. And how God always has viewed sin.

Micah of Moresheth was a Hebrew prophet, and a contemporary of the great Isaiah. Micah has never been much considered, because He spoke even so long ago for mercy and love and against religiosity. You might say that Micah was three thousand years ahead of His time. He very long ago foresaw a day when we all would discover that in truth there really is a gentler and more loving genuine God who does not inspire our quivering fear or demand our sacrifices, and certainly one that does not demand that we sacrifice to God His own beloved Son. From a time eight centuries before the birth of Jesus, Micah still speaks truth to us. And His words still sing! I discovered Micah one Sunday when I was ten or twelve, when our gentle pastor printed his words in our Sunday bulletin. I cut them out that day and taped them above my desk, where they remained for the rest of my growing-up:

“With what shall I come to the Lord and bow myself before the God on high? Shall I come to Him with burnt offerings, with yearling calves? Does the Lord take delight in thousands of rams, in ten thousand rivers of oil? Shall I present my firstborn for my rebellious acts, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul? He has told you, O man, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?” (Micah 6:6-8).

Sin was then, is now, and always has been nothing more than a foolish and ignorant human idea.

Through many dangers, toils and snares
We have already come!
‘Twas grace hath brought me safe thus far,
And grace will lead us home.

And when we’ve been there ten thousand years,
Bright shining as the sun!
We’ll have no less days to sing God’s praise
Than when we’d first begun….
– John Newton (1725-1807), from “Amazing Grace” (1779) 

God and Suffering

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

God hath not promised skies always blue,
Flower-strewn pathways all our lives through.
God hath not promised sun without rain,
Joy without sorrow, peace without pain.

God hath not promised we shall not know
Toil and temptation, trouble and woe.
He hath not told us we shall not bear
Many a burden, Many a care.

 But God hath promised strength for the day,
Rest for the labor, light for the way.
Grace for the trials, help from above,
Unfailing sympathy, undying love.
– Annie Johnson Flint (1866-1932), from “What God Hath Promised” (1919)

I have on occasion heard from people who have emailed and told me that God should have prevented some tragedy or other in their own lives, or in the life of the world. So I will tell these folks why we plan such difficult lessons into our lives even before we are born, and how stressful or painful problems actually help us to grow spiritually, and why the fact that this life on earth is not our real life, and no one ever actually dies, means that everyone truly will be fine in the end, so please don’t take all of this so seriously! I have sometimes called things which might look like tragedies, or like evidence that God doesn’t care, what they actually are, which is divine gifts from which powerful learning and growth can arise. But for most of those who were complaining to me that God simply does not love us enough, I don’t think that my answers ever were of much help. The thought that God would allow this or that especially painful and upsetting thing to happen meant to the person who was complaining to me that God was not on the side of the angels after all.

I have gradually come to accept the fact that indeed God is only Love, despite the fact that bad things very often happen to good people. And bad things can happen even with what we might call the active participation of a perfectly loving God. Consider these facts:

  • This material reality is not our real life. Until you can get yourself grounded in two facts, you really don’t know anything. Study first the basic truth that this reality is consciousness-based. And then of course understand the fact that human life is eternal, and you will be eons ahead in grasping what really is going on! You will especially feel as if you almost can see the Mind of God working. In fact, everything that ever happens acttually is happening inside God’s Mind. So all is safe and limited, and it ends in God’s arms. How bad can things ever get?
  • The difficulties in our lives are geneerally of our own choosing. Before we are born, we plan these lives. And since we know that we are coming into each lifetime with the hope of gaining from it as much spiritual growth as possible, together with our spirit guides and others, we will often plan difficult and stressful experiences from which we can gain great spiritual lessons. People have insisted to me that they never would have planned their awful brain cancer diagnosis or the death of their child! And they have bitterly sworn these things to me, even as I could see them deepening and growing as they never could have otherwise done, had nothing bad ever happened to them.
  • Pain helps us to learn and grow. You can see this happening all around you if you look for it, and at all levels. If the baby doesn’t fall down a few times, he never can learn how to walk, now, can he? When some experiment of Thomas Edison’s failed for the umpteenth time, and a friend commiserated with him about the frustration of having that happen yet again, Edison told his friend cheerfully that the failure was not a problem for him at all. He said, “We are just one failure closer to figuring out what will work!”
  • The suffering in each of us calls out to other people. On an individual scale, we learn to feel compassion, and then to feel and give love, by seeing other people who are damaged and who need and are grateful for our help. On a greater, and even on an epic scale, we can see that the result of bullying is damage and pain in unthinkable numbers; so ultimately, we are coming to learn that such bullying must never be allowed to happen again. Humankind as an entire species slowly but inevitably advances in part through the ghastly learning of great wars and profound calamities.
  • Physical pain cannot be remembered. It is an oddity of physical pain that, while it is useful for training purposes, and the fact of having had a pain can be remembered, the sensation of pain itself cannot be recalled to mind. It is one of the very few things which mercifully cannot be re-experienced, which is of course yet one more beautiful sign of God’s great mercy.

Our beloved friend, the great afterlife expert Dr. R. Craig Hogan, calls this brief and often painful material life “earth school,” which indeed is what it is. And that is all that it is! Inevitably, each of us comes here to learn, to get our shins bruised and our knuckles rapped because that is how we best can learn spiritually. But then, yes, we finally do get to go home from school to milk and cookies, and to Mom’s and Dad’s hugs. And then there will be another school day tomorrow. And perhaps another school day after that. Some lifetimes on earth we will enjoy, but many of them – true! – will be pretty awful. Eventually, though, if we work hard and learn well, we know that we can look forward to growing up spiritually. We know that the last of all our lifetimes on earth will come eventually, after which we will forever enjoy basking in the ultimate light of God’s perfect Love.

What does Jesus have to say about all this? Jesus first tells us what we need to be learning and devoutly practicing in order to help to make this life on earth our last necessary earth-lifetime. All of this is basic stuff! Most of us can now recite it by heart: “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the great and foremost commandment.  The second is like it, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments depend the whole Law and the Prophets” (MT 22:37-40).

There are many other places in the Gospels, too, where we can turn when we want to feel closer to Jesus as He helps us to feel closer to, and helps us to somewhat better understand the God of all. And one of those wonderful Gospel chapters that I enjoy reading, and then I think for awhile about the words of my beloved Friend, mostly because there is so much there to wonder about, is the Thirteenth Chapter of the Book of Luke:

13 There were some present who reported to Him about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had shed along with their sacrifices. 2 And Jesus said to them, “Do you suppose that these Galileans were greater sinners than all other Galileans because they suffered this fate? 3 I tell you, no, but unless you reform your own minds, you will all likewise perish. 4 Or do you suppose that those eighteen on whom the tower in Siloam fell and killed them were worse culprits than all the men who live in Jerusalem? 5 I tell you, no, but unless you purify your own minds, you all likewise will perish.”

6 And He began telling this parable: “A man had a fig tree which had been planted in his vineyard; and he came looking for fruit on it and did not find any. 7 And he said to the vineyard-keeper, ‘Behold, for three years I have come looking for fruit on this fig tree without finding any. Cut it down! Why does it even use up the ground?’ 8 And he answered and said to him, ‘Let it alone, sir, for this year too, until I dig around it and put in fertilizer; 9 and if it bears fruit next year, fine; but if not, then cut it down.’”

10 And He was teaching in one of the synagogues on the Sabbath. 11 And there was a woman who for eighteen years had had a sickness caused by a spirit; and she was bent double, and could not straighten up at all. 12 When Jesus saw her, He called her over and said to her, “Woman, you are freed from your sickness.” 13 And He laid His hands on her; and immediately she was made erect again and began glorifying God. 14 But the synagogue official, indignant because Jesus had healed on the Sabbath, began saying to the crowd in response, “There are six days in which work should be done; so come during them and get healed, and not on the Sabbath day.” 15 But the Lord answered him and said, “You hypocrites, does not each of you on the Sabbath untie his ox or his donkey from the stall and lead him away to water him? 16 And this woman, a daughter of Abraham as she is, whom Satan has bound for eighteen long years, should she not have been released from this bond on the Sabbath day?” 17 As He said this, all His opponents were being humiliated; and the entire crowd was rejoicing over all the glorious things being done by Him.

18 So He was saying, “What is the kingdom of God like, and to what shall I compare it? 19 It is like a mustard seed, which a man took and threw into his own garden; and it grew and became a tree, and the birds of the air nested in its branches.”

20 And again He said, “To what shall I compare the kingdom of God? 21 It is like leaven, which a woman took and hid in three pecks of flour until it was all leavened.”

22 And He was passing through from one city and village to another, teaching, and proceeding on His way to Jerusalem. 23 And someone said to Him, “Lord, are there just a few who are being saved?” And He said to them, 24 “Strive to enter through the narrow door; for many, I tell you, will seek to enter and will not be able. 25 Once the head of the house gets up and shuts the door, and you begin to stand outside and knock on the door, saying, ‘Lord, open up to us!’ then He will answer and say to you, ‘I do not know where you are from.’ 26 Then you will begin to say, ‘We ate and drank in Your presence, and You taught in our streets’; 27 and He will say, ‘I tell you, I do not know where you are from; depart from Me, all you evildoers.’ 28 In that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth when you see Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and all the prophets in the kingdom of God, but yourselves being thrown out. 29 And they will come from east and west and from north and south, and will recline at the table in the kingdom of God. 30 And behold, some are last who will be first and some are first who will be last.”

31 Just at that time some Pharisees approached, saying to Him, “Go away, leave here, for Herod wants to kill You.” 32 And He said to them, “Go and tell that fox, ‘Behold, I cast out demons and perform cures today and tomorrow, and the third day I reach My goal.’ 33 Nevertheless I must journey on today and tomorrow and the next day; for it cannot be that a prophet would perish outside of Jerusalem. 34 O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those sent to her! How often I wanted to gather your children together, just as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you would not have it! 35 Behold, your house is left to you desolate; and I say to you, you will not see Me until the time comes when you say, ‘Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord!’” (LK 13:1-35)

Oh my dear ones, every time I read that Gospel chapter, there is something different in it that catches on my mind! But to end this investigation of these complex, and perhaps difficult mysteries on a note of pure praise to God, here is the 46th Psalm. This lovely Psalm of the Sons of Korah was being sung in praise to the Love of God as far back in human history as the days of Moses, nearly half a millennium before those beautiful Psalms that were first sung to God’s Love by King David. Even as much as thirty-five hundred years ago, no matter how much suffering was then being visited upon humankind, we still in response sang to God songs of gratitude and jubilation! Oh, what perfect peace comes to us, even today, from these simple words sung in golden comfort: “Be still, and know that I am God.” 

God is our refuge and strength,
A very present help in times of trouble.
2 Therefore we will not fear, though the earth should change
And though the mountains slip into the heart of the sea;
3 Though its waters roar and foam,
Though the mountains quake at its swelling pride.

4 There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God,
The holy dwelling places of the Most High.
5 God is in the midst of her, she will not be moved;
God will help her when morning dawns.
6 The nations made an uproar, the kingdoms tottered;
He raised His voice, the earth melted.
7 The Lord of hosts is with us;
The God of Jacob is our stronghold.

8 Come, behold the works of the Lord,
Who has wrought desolations in the earth.
9 He makes wars to cease to the end of the earth;
He breaks the bow and cuts the spear in two;
He burns the chariots with fire.
10 “Be still, and know that I am God;
I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in all the earth.”
11 The Lord of hosts is with us;
The God of Jacob is our stronghold.

 

Ours To Do

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

Let there be peace on earth, and let it begin with me.
Let there be peace on earth, the peace that was meant to be!
With God as our Father, brothers all are we.
Let me walk with my brother in perfect harmony.

 Let peace begin with me. Let this be the moment, now.
With ev’ry step I take, let this be my solemn vow.
To take each moment, and live each moment in peace eternally!
Let there be peace on earth, and let it begin with me.
– Sy Miller (1908-1971) & Jill Jackson, from “Let There be Peace on Earth” (1955)

Jesus came to earth determined to do what even He must have known was going to be impossible to do without our help. And human beings are deeply tribal by nature, able to trust only a maximum number of one hundred and fifty people at a time as our true familiars. That is called “Dunbar’s Number,” believe it or not. And it may well be that this maximum possible number of familiars that any of us can maintain has always been true of us, since even back as far as our Cro-Magnon days. It has been true since literally time out of mind! Jesus, on the other hand, came to transform us all into one great and perfectly loving kingdom of God on earth. So we might actually call eight billion people “Jesus’s Number”. Jesus wants us to be able to see every other person on earth as our personal soul-brother. He wants us to love and trust all eight billion strangers at once as members of our own great and much-beloved and entirely trusted tribe.

How did Jesus Himself put it? He said when He was asked what was the greatest commandment, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the great and foremost commandment.  The second is like it, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments depend the whole Law and the Prophets” (MT 22:37-40). Such simple, and such truly beautiful words!

Jesus called it “bringing the kingdom of God on earth.” In the afterlife we actually do feel as if we are immersed in God’s love, so we might also say of it, “As above, so below”. I used to fret a good deal about what Jesus even meant by the term “the kingdom of God,” and whether perhaps the terms “the kingdom of God” and “the kingdom of heaven” perhaps meant different things. Eventually I concluded, for reasons too convoluted to pause and delineate here, that both terms referred to the highest afterlife levels, the levels just below the Godhead level. I decided that the fact that the Gospel of Matthew generally refers to this level of spiritual perfection as the kingdom of heaven, while the other three Biblical Gospels use the term “the kingdom of God,” only as two different means of expression, or of translation. But both terms mean the same thing.

Yet if Jesus came to bring that sort of universal love to all the earth, we seem even after two thousand years to have made no progress in that direction.  I am sorry to blight your beautiful morning, but here is one of the most disheartening things that I have ever seen.  An American Jew recently passed himself off as Italian and went to the West Bank to interview some of its inhabitants. And the plain ignorance and hatred of Jews on the part of these Muslims living right next to Israel is beyond your worst imaginings.

So, what happens now? Is there anything that you and I can do at this stage to even help at all? It seems to be time for us to say plainly that every religion has been altogether useless in our efforts to bring peace to the world. All that our religions have managed to do has been to make all our problems even worse! And if you didn’t believe this was true before, then be sure to have a listen to those Muslims living in the West Bank in the recording that is linked above.

I didn’t know until the summer of 2022 that Thomas, my beloved spirit guide, is Jesus’s close eternal friend, and that Thomas takes me along when he visits with Jesus in the third level of the astral plane on nearly every night of my life while my body sleeps. Thomas is my spirit guide, so he is not supposed to leave me alone during my lifetime on earth. He also is a source of friendship and support for Jesus, so his solution is simply to give me amnesia about all these nightly jaunts that we share. However, I was supposed to be working on building a website for Jesus in 2022, so very briefly there was a reason for me to be remembering these evenings when I was hanging out with Thomas and Jesus in the middle of the night. Which was why my summer of 2022 was so extraordinary. On many nights, I would go to sleep at eight o’clock or so, which is usual for me, since I normally wake up at midnight and I do my best writing between midnight and three or four in the morning. But often during that summer, I would come to awareness soon after my physical eyes closed; and amazingly, Thomas and I would be there with Jesus on His astral riverbank! It was then that I got to ask Jesus so many questions. And one question that I asked Him that summer was whether He really had come to earth intending to abolish all religions. I did not yet fully comprehend, even so recently as two years ago, how abhorrent to Jesus religions really are. Let me set this amazing scene for you:

I came to awareness sitting beside Jesus where we often sat to talk together during that summer. We were sitting on His riverbank on the third level of the astral plane, with our astral feet in the living water that feels like silk, and feeding His neon-colored fish with grain that simply would appear in our hands. He has a flock of pet deer, too, and they were grazing in a field behind us. Jesus always would tamp down His personal energy by a lot for me so I could sit beside Him that way, but still, there was a little warm buzz from Him that I could feel. And on the third astral level, there is a diffuse light with no sun, and a many-colored sky that makes the atmosphere feel something like a perpetual sunset. There is a lovely scent that isn’t quite like flowers, and a feeling of love that is always around you.

As Jesus and I sat there, tossing bits of grain to the fish, I said respectfully and rather shyly, “My Lord, is it really true that when You came to earth, one of Your reasons for coming was to abolish religions? To help people relate to God more directly?”

As He often did, Jesus read my mind, and He took His answer from my own mind. After a moment He said, “Little One, you know it to be true.”

He said that gently. He was smiling a little. He knows how much his presence overwhelms me.

A year ago, I wrote a blog post that summarized what Jesus is quoted in the Biblical Gospels as saying about religions. I cannot now improve upon what I said there, so please consider that post to be incorporated here.

We tend to think of Jesus as having taught only or mostly Jews, but that was really not the case. As He began His earthly ministry, He moved out of Nazareth and away from the more narrowly Jewish culture into which He had been born, into “Galilee of the Gentiles,” to fulfill Isaiah’s prophesy (see MT 4:15). And it was there that He first began to call His disciples. The excerpt from the Book of Matthew quoted below describes those early days in Galilee:

17 From that time Jesus began to preach and say, “Reform your mind, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” 18Now as Jesus was walking by the Sea of Galilee, He saw two brothers, Simon who was called Peter, and Andrew his brother, casting a net into the sea; for they were fishermen. 19 And He said to them, “Follow Me, and I will make you fishers of men.” 20 Immediately they left their nets and followed Him. 21 Going on from there He saw two other brothers, James the son of Zebedee, and John his brother, in the boat with Zebedee their father, mending their nets; and He called them. 22 Immediately they left the boat and their father, and followed Him. 23 Jesus was going throughout all Galilee, teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the gospel of the kingdom, and healing every kind of disease and every kind of sickness among the people. 24 The news about Him spread throughout all Syria; and they brought to Him all who were ill, those suffering with various diseases and pains, demoniacs, epileptics, paralytics; and He healed them. 25 Large crowds followed Him from Galilee and the Decapolis and Jerusalem and Judea and from beyond the Jordan (MT 4:17-25).

And as Jesus collected His first disciples, He continued to teach about the kingdom of heaven wherever He went, to the crowds of hundreds, and then of thousands of people who followed Him everywhere. For example, Jesus said, “The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed, which a man took and sowed in his field; and this is smaller than all other seeds, but when it is full grown, it is larger than the garden plants and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and nest in its branches” (MT 13:31–32).

This sounds almost like a throwaway story, but it is an important teaching! Pliny the Elder, a botanist and a contemporary of Jesus, wrote two things about the mustard plant: It is medicinal, but Pliny warned against growing it because it tends to take over the entire garden. So those would have been the images on which Jesus was building. He taught that the kingdom of God is good for us – it is grows from a tiny seed, and it is healing, transformative, and life-giving – and once we espouse and cultivate it, the kingdom of God will grow rapidly in the world. Jesus talks about loving everyone and turning the other cheek, doing to others as we would have them do unto us, and living a simple and gentle life. He said that once we are perfectly living these lives filled with love that He prescribes, we can bring the kingdom of God on earth. He intended the old world to soon be over. 

So then, why is the old world not over by now? What happened? I think the answer to that question is a simple one. The kingdom of God on earth is internal. It is something that each of us must individually allow and accept to grow within us. And until each of us, individually, is ready to do that, it cannot arrive. As Jesus said, “The kingdom of God is not coming with signs to be observed; nor will they say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or, ‘There it is!’ For behold, the kingdom of God is within you” (LK 17:20-21).

Every time that each of us prays as Jesus taught us to pray, and each time that we mean those words as we say them, we begin to make the arrival of the kingdom of God on earth even possible! As you will recall, Jesus taught us to pray: ‘Our Father who is in heaven, hallowed (or holy) be Your name.10 ‘Your kingdom come. Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven (MT 6:9-10). As you have said those words, have you ever said them consciously, thoughtfully, with meaning, with yielding, and actually thinking with full awareness about what you were saying, and what it deeply means? I myself never had, until Thomas first made me realize the amazing importance of each of those words!

The people to whom Jesus first taught The Lord’s Prayer did not know that this earthly reality is created by and composed of what we each experience as Consciousness. In fact, nothing else but what you and I experience as Consciousness actually exists. And there is in fact just one Consciousness, which all eight billion of us who are now on earth share. So as each of us raises our own Consciousness vibratory rate away from fear and hatred and toward ever more perfect love, we also will minutely raise the vibratory rate of everyone else on earth. Which means that as more and more of us raise the vibration of the Consciousness within us to the level of God’s pure and perfect love, oh yes indeed, we will easily help every other person on earth to raise his or her own spiritual vibratory rate as well. So then we can at last all together easily bring the kingdom of God on earth!  

Let there be peace on earth, and let it begin with me.
Let there be peace on earth, the peace that was meant to be!
With God as our Father, brothers all are we.
Let me walk with my brother in perfect harmony. 

Let peace begin with me. Let this be the moment, now.
With ev’ry step I take, let this be my solemn vow.
To take each moment, and live each moment in peace eternally!
Let there be peace on earth, and let it begin with me.
– Sy Miller (1908-1971) & Jill Jackson, from “Let There be Peace on Earth” (1955)

Hatred

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored.
He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword!
His truth is marching on.
Glory, Glory, hallelujah! Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Glory, glory, hallelujah! His truth is marching on.

 I have seen Him in the watch-fires of a hundred circling camps.
They have builded Him an altar in the evening dews and damps.
I can read His righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps.
His day is marching on.
Glory, glory, hallelujah! Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Glory, glory, hallelujah! His day is marching on.
– Julia Ward Howe (1819-1910) & John William Steffe (1830-1890), from “Battle Hymn of the Republic” (1862).

My beloved Thomas and I are still trying to figure out which one of us has won our bet of last week, or even if in fact there ever was a bet that was formally entered between us. Thomas thought it was important that we write a blog post about the flat-out, beyond-amazing moment when God intervened just as someone tried to assassinate one of the American presidential candidates. Thomas wanted to use that horrifying incident as a teaching moment about some of the very rare times when God actually does in fact play an active role in human events, and he wanted to talk about why and how God might ever want to intervene. Thomas was pretty pumped about our using God’s saving of Donald Trump’s life as a teaching moment. But I, on the contrary, was sure that if we wrote about that when things in this country are at such a fever pitch of negativity as they are right now, all that we were going to get would be a whole lot of vitriol thrown at us. No one was going to want to learn from that event anything nuanced about how God might work in the world.

So, who was right? I think that I was more right in this case than he was. Actually, those commenters who read our blog post last week before commenting did try to do what we had requested, and they viewed this as an exercise in better understanding how God sometimes works in the world, rather than just voicing their personal animosity for the candidate who had been shot and only wounded. And we do so very much appreciate those honest commenters who spoke so wisely and so well! There were other people, though, who ferreted out even from a distance the possibility that here was yet another spot where they might have a chance to voice their hatred for Donald Trump, and they attempted to pile on and do that. Fortunately, I get to approve first-time commenters, so I spared you all their loathsome bile. And as I was doing that, Thomas said, “Well, we’ve got a great topic for next week’s blog post, if nothing else.”

Wow, was he ever right about that! I don’t think that we ever have talked about hatred as a blog topic here, not once in our more than ten years of writing these weekly posts. How can we have missed such an obvious topic? Hatred is both sadly almost universal and currently highly topical. It is something that those who fall victim to it tend so often to see as even actually a virtue. Surely some of those who were in the grips of hatred and commented on our post of last week felt virtuous about their hatred. Which fact astonished me.

I was about to begin by telling you that hatred is useless, and then to go on and tell you how spiritually damaging hatred is to the hater. But no, there is indeed one situation in which hatred can be useful, so let’s first just mention that. The only situation in which hatred can be useful is in the case of an all-out war meant to end in the civilizational death of one set of combatants. Yes, I will indeed cede to you that point. So that is the topic of our frame-verse today, and a lovely frame-verse it is indeed, even if we all hope that we never will have to sing it! Killing another human being is not a natural thing, so if you have to go to war for real, then by all means, gin up in yourself some hatred so you can become a sure-enough killer. But is there an all-out war at that level going on for you at this moment? No? Then no one has any justification for hating anyone else, nor for assuming that God hates anyone at all!

 Never having talked about nor written about hatred, I am not sure how even to begin to write about it now. In fact, in peacetime there is nothing that is good or useful about hatred on any level. Not for the hater, not for the one being hated, and not for the world at large. So, let’s begin there:

  • What we experience as human consciousness is the only thing that actually exists. All the rest of what seems to exist is imagined by our minds. Our minds are all part of that one great scale of human consciousness, and like all forms of energy, consciousness vibrates. Its vibration is in the key of human emotion, so at its highest vibration, consciousness vibrates as perfect love; while at its lowest emotion, consciousness vibrates as seething hatred, rage, and terror. Consciousness is what we are.
  • The reason why we choose to be born on earth is so we can learn how to raise our own consciousness vibration more firmly toward love. There are a few other reasons, but for nearly all of us, that is pretty much the sole reason why we are here. We are going through all that we go through on earth as exercises to move ourselves away from all the lowest and ishiest emotions, and ever closer to ever more perfect love. So, if rather than zealously doing all that we can to raise our personal consciousness vibration toward ever more perfect love, we are instead encouraging in ourselves ever more hatred and anger toward, say, certain politicians or other public figures who aren’t even directly in our own lives, we will be severely lowering our personal consciousness vibration, rather than raising it. And that can result in our complete waste of this entire lifetime!
  • The people that we hate in public life don’t care that we hate them. Sadly, politicians assume that being hated by a certain number of people goes with the territory, and they really don’t care. Your hatred and rage doesn’t harm them at all. There you are, seething with your mighty rage at Biden or Kamala or Trump, or indeed at whomever you might have decided is worth your spending all your rage and hate on this person, your bile, your sour stomach acid and your poor head aching; and the object of all your rage will just go happily on, perhaps even hitting a hole-in-one at the seventh hole. He or she neither knows nor cares how you feel.
  • Hating even one person, no matter how justified your hatred in that single case might feel to you, establishes in your mind a pathway for a hatred habit that makes your future hatreds of individual people, and then of groups of people, very much easier. And it forever destroys your personal peace. As more and more negative energy accumulates in your mind, you also are looking more closely at each new person that you meet, and even at each new person that you see, to determine whether this is someone else that you feel is worthy of your hatred. I kid you not! This is really what happens. Not to Donald Trump or Kamala, of course. It is what happens to you, if you allow yourself to actively hate even one person.

We in the northern American states watched in amazement during the nineteen-fifties and -sixties as the schools in some of our southeastern states had to be racially integrated by armed police. And all because some light-skinned American southerners had taught themselves over time to hate dark-skinned people. Do you see how this works? Once hatred gains a foothold in people’s minds, it is incredibly so easily self-reinforcing. And it ends altogether even the possibility of any spiritual growth in those who espouse it, which is why some southern churches even to this day are sadly full of whole congregations that are oddly insular and permanently angry.

Ginned-up hatred of an opposition leader is sometimes used by politicians as a tool to rile up their bases. It is now being used pretty forcefully by some Democrats against Mr. Trump, probably because, as I remarked last week, I think it is easy to see Trump as a highly distasteful public figure. He has a huge ego, he makes up nasty names for people, he insists on always being right, he loves to show off his wealth, and he was a big womanizer when he was young: what is there not to dislike about this man? But you cannot give in to the temptation to hate Donald Trump without risking the complete destruction of your own spiritual progress for this lifetime. For my own part, I have successfully resisted the temptation to hate him by looking at his children, all of whom seem by every account to be happy and successful drug- and vice-free adults who all remain close to and idolize their father. There must be something good in Donald Trump, because a loving fatherhood of five adult children when three mothers are involved is a difficult trick to pull off, and it does not happen by chance. I also consider the fact that Trump’s presidential term was much better for his country than was Joe Biden’s term that followed it, from the Abraham Accords and no foreign wars to a decent economy with low inflation and a surplus of oil right down to the efficiently closed southern border. I also have received a couple of emails during this past week from people who told me about some surprising private kindnesses from Donald Trump that he never has wanted to make public. So I focus on just these good things. I ignore the things that I always have disliked about the man.

What does our beloved Jesus say about hate? He says very little, actually. “Hate” is such a strongly negative word that Jesus seldom uses it. But only consider this string of statements in the Gospel of John that comes toward the end of the Lord’s earthly life as He is preparing His disciples to go out into the world and teach the Lord’s Way:

“For everyone who does evil hates the Light, and does not come to the Light for fear that his deeds will be exposed” (JN 3:20).

“The world cannot hate you, but it hates Me because I testify of it, that its deeds are evil” (JN 7:7). 

“If the world hates you, you know that it has hated Me before it hated you. If you were of the world, the world would love its own; but because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, because of this the world hates you” (JN 15:18-19).

“He who hates Me hates My Father also. If I had not done among them the works which no one else did, they would not have sin; but now they have both seen and hated Me and My Father as well. But they have done this to fulfill the word that is written in their Law, ‘They hated Me without a cause’” (JN 15: 23-25).

So, the Christianity which should have been rooted in the love-based teachings of Jesus alone, was instead founded by the Roman Emperor Constantine some three hundred years after Jesus’s resurrection and ascension. And it was based not on anything that Jesus taught, but instead it was based on the Emperor Constantine’s own fear-based ideas about Jesus’s having died for our sins. To ensure his false Christianity’s success, Constantine massacred or drove off into the deep desert every follower of Jesus who would not convert to His own fear- and hatred-based religion.

As we now contemplate the evils of a political system that uses the ginning-up of hatred in us of one politician against another, we must never forget one crucial fact. We come to earth to raise our personal spiritual vibration more toward love! That is the whole reason why we even are here in the first place. But if we submit to these hatred-filled political games, even for a moment, we might well be rendering useless and wasted our entire lifetime that is now being lived upon this earth!  

I have read a fiery gospel writ in burnished rows of steel
“As ye deal with my contemners, so with you my grace shall deal.”
Let the Hero, born of woman, crush the serpent with his heel,
Since God is marching on.
Glory, glory, hallelujah! Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Glory, glory, hallelujah! Since God is marching on!

He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat!
He is sifting out the hearts of men before His judgment-seat
Oh, be swift, my soul, to answer Him! Be jubilant, my feet!
Our God is marching on.
Glory, glory, hallelujah! Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Glory, glory, hallelujah! Our God is marching on!

 In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea
With a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me.
As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free!
While God is marching on.
Glory, glory, hallelujah! Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Glory, glory, hallelujah! While God is marching on.
– Julia Ward Howe (1819-1910) & John William Steffe (1830-1890), from “Battle Hymn of the Republic” (1862).

Buy the books:

– Categories –

– Subscribe –

Follow Roberta’s blog for inspiration, book news, and updates!

– Podcast –

Join hundreds of thousands of listeners! Tune in to Roberta’s Podcast. Shows posted each Monday.

Listen

– Get In Touch –

Have a question to ask Roberta? Complete the form below to contact her.

Contact

- Archives -